WAKE UP - Mark Reviews Movies

Wake Up, Blue Fox Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 3, 2025

Sometimes, you walk into a store and marvel that it seems to have everything. The makers of Wake Up apparently walked into a branch of a specific chain of home goods stores and imagined a game of deadly cat-and-mouse unfolding. It is, admittedly, a deviously great idea for a thriller that, in practice here, unfortunately outstays its welcome and becomes far too contrived in its effort to keep itself going.

Most of it depends on a heavily convenient series of events to even get started, but we'll give Alberto Marini's screenplay (based on an original idea by Martin Soudan, who apparently is the one who saw more than mass-manufactured furniture and meatballs in a particular store) the necessary suspension of disbelief on that one. After all, the audience has to accept at least the basic premise of a story, or there'd be almost no stories left to tell. It is worth noting how convoluted the plot is from the start, however, simply because that becomes a pattern here.

On one side of the conflict is a group of ecological activists, who walk into a popular and spacious home goods shop just before closing time, hide in assorted places (under furniture, in the storage area, and behind a big sign, for example), and emerge after all the employees have left and the lights go out to cause havoc. The group, led by Ethan (Benny O. Arthur) but revolving around de facto protagonist Karim (Tom Gould), has a big problem with the company using wood from rain forests to make its lines of furniture. In response, they put graffiti and stickers throughout the store, pour blood and toss an animal heart from a butcher's shop into a display toilet, and make a series of videos of their vandalism, in order to encourage others to do the same at their local shop.

On the other side is a pair of security guards and brothers named Kevin (Turlough Convery) and Jack (Aidan O'Hare). They're in the store's security center, not paying a bit of attention to the monitors because the two have had a bad day on the job until then (This is especially convenient for the activists, who apparently gambled on the guards during night shift to be incompetent for their plan to work). Kevin is, well, an odd one with a short fuse, who had a physical confrontation with a kid in the store. After some convincing, Jack managed to save his brother's job, but the two are stuck with graveyard duty for a while.

The most important detail, though, is that Kevin participates in something called "primitive hunting," which amounts to using one's bare hands and only what can be found in nature to kill game. He's quite skilled at it, as he proves earlier in the movie by constructing an elaborate mouse trap, and once Kevin realizes that there are intruders in the store and that both brothers could be fired if anyone discovers what has happened, he gets very, very mad.

There's a better rationale for Kevin to hunt these young activists, of course, but since much of the purpose of the script and the filmmaking is to shock, that motive won't be disclosed here. It's irrelevant, anyway, because the screenplay keeps repeating the same process so many times that it's almost inevitable that Kevin's reason for wanting to torment and murder these intruders will repeat itself again, too. This is the kind of movie that almost demands one to stop thinking, not because it's exciting, but because to give any plot occurrence or character choice here a second thought is to allow the movie's logic to collapse.

Clearly, the directing team credited as RKSS (siblings Anouk and Yoann-Karl Whissel) comprehend that to at least some degree, so once the basics are in place to keep the activists stuck in the store and unable to communicate with the outside world, the movie becomes more about a series of suspense and action sequences. On their own, some of these are clever and brutal—or brutal enough that we're not thinking about anything other than the violence on display. Kevin hunts his targets with weapons he has on hand or finds among the store's diverse inventory, sets makeshift booby traps, and uses some of his opponents as live bait to lure out the others.

As for why Kevin comes up with such intricate schemes when he has a deadline (before people show up for work in the morning) and none of the activists seem especially capable of fighting back against him, the only rationale seems to be so that the movie's central gimmick can function. After a while, we can sense Marini struggling to come up with a reason for some of these sequences, such as a neat-looking but ultimately pointless bit with glow-in-the-dark paint. When some of Kevin's game with the surviving intruders has him force them to construct furniture, the movie's internal logic has pretty much collapsed.

One wants to give a thriller like Wake Up, which does possess such a nifty premise, as much leeway as possible. The effort to keep up this one, though, is so strained and so transparent that it becomes increasingly difficult to do so.

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